From: Shadsfax Issue 34 (2001) 3
The Shadows
"The Hit Sound Of The Shadows"
Universal / Connoisseur VSOP CD341
Released May 2001
The Connoisseur Collection is one of the many mid-priced series on the market today offering a wide range of artists and styles of music: to take just two examples from their listings, there is an excellent disc focusing on John Barry with the emphasis on beat numbers (including Walk Don’t Run), and a superb selection from Dave Edmunds that takes in the masterly Queen Of Hearts covered so effectively by The Shads.
If you have never got round to adding to your collection the remakes of the great classics issued on the 1989 album ‘The Shadows At Their Very Best’, then here is another chance, for a relatively modest outlay, to catch up with them, or with eighteen of them anyway. Out go the new versions of The Boys (no great loss) and Genie With The Light Brown Lamp (one of the better ones), in come Riders In The Sky and The Third Man. Why these two particular tracks were chosen to bring the tally to a straight twenty is not explained.
The liner notes however do have some discussion of the rationale behind the making of ‘Very Best’, and random observations on the group’s activities in the Eighties. Bad marks though for the luridly coloured portraits of group and group members.
MC